Freematics Esprit – Arduino Compatible Dev Board for IoT & Telematics

Freematics Esprit is an Arduino compatible development board based on Espressif ESP32 SoC designed for casual or serious IoT and telematics projects. The board leads out nearly all I/O pins from ESP32 into standard Arduino factor, making it familiar to Arduino players and also compatible with some existing Arduino shields.

Features

We are specialized in the telematics field and this development board was designed with telematics features in consideration. It features an xBee socket with switchable VCC voltage (3.3V/5V) , so our 2G (SIM800) and 3G (SIM5360) bee modules will work on it to provide cellular network access. ESP32 provides 3 hardware serial UARTs, while the first/primary serial UART is connected to USB for uploading and debugging purpose, the second and third serial UARTs can be accessed from two onboard 4-pin connectors which our OBD-II adapter and GPS receiver can be hooked on. The 4 I/O pins exposed can also be configured as digital I/O, analog input or I2C purposes thanks to the flexible GPIO remapping design of ESP32. The onboard 4-pin I2C port can host an I2C OLED module directly.

Hardware

Specifications

Dual-core Tensilica LX6 microprocessor

Up to 240MHz clock frequency

520kB internal SRAM

Integrated 802.11 BGN WiFi transceiver

Integrated dual-mode Bluetooth (classic and BLE)

10-electrode capacitive touch support

Hardware accelerated encryption (AES, SHA2, ECC, RSA-4096)

4MB Flash memory

Auto reset on USB uploading

Onboard I2C port

Onboard serial UARTs port (2x) with switchable VCC voltage

Onboard xBee socket with switchable VCC voltage

Pinout

Freematics ESPRIT leads out nearly all useful ESP32’s GPIO pins, arranged in a deliberated order, to balance between accessibility and Arduino compatibility.

In addition to standard Arduino pin headers, following extra interfaces are available.

In fact, ESP32’s GPIO pins are fully configurable so the above additional pinouts are just for default/recommended usage and literally they can be remapped for any I/O purposes.

The VCC switch toggles between 3.3V and 5V for VCC pins of both serial UART header and xBee socket. The VCC/GND pins on UART header can be used to power the board, for example by Freematics OBD-II UART adapter.

The standard xBee socket VCC voltage is 3.3V, however, as we have released a series of cellular network bee modules which require 5V input, the switchable VCC makes the modules work on the board as well.

Schematic

Software

Freematics ESPRIT is ideal for programming with ESP32 Arduino core. When developing with Arduino IDE or Platform IO, please choose ESP32 Dev Module as board type. We hate to add another entry in the board type list as there are already too many literally same variants. To unleash more power from ESP32, we are currently developing a dedicated library for our board, so resources like BLE and CAN can be easily accessed from Arduino sketches.